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Cover image: Dynamic Turn, 2006, Paul Saroglou, oil on canvas © Paul Saroglou

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CROSSCURRENTSSeries Editor: Christopher Watkin

This series explores the development of European thought through engagements with the arts, humanities, social sciences and sciences.

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Danielle Sands xxxxxxxx

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‘xxxxxxxxxx.’ xxxxxxx Animal Writing

Storytelling, Selfhood and the Limits of Empathy

DANIELLE SANDS

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Crosscurrents

Exploring the development of European thought through engagements with the arts, humanities, social sciences and sciences

Series EditorChristopher Watkin, Monash University

Editorial Advisory BoardAndrew BenjaminMartin CrowleySimon CritchleyFrederiek DepoortereOliver FelthamPatrick ffrench Christopher FynskKevin HartEmma Wilson

Titles available in the series

Difficult Atheism: Post-Theological Thinking in Alain Badiou, Jean-Luc Nancy and Quentin MeillassouxChristopher Watkin

Politics of the Gift: Exchanges in PoststructuralismGerald Moore

Unfinished Worlds: Hermeneutics, Aesthetics and GadamerNicholas Davey

The Figure of This World: Agamben and the Question of Political OntologyMathew Abbott

The Becoming of the Body: Contemporary Women’s Writing in FrenchAmaleena Damlé

Philosophy, Animality and the Life SciencesWahida Khandker

The Event Universe: The Revisionary Metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead Leemon B. McHenry

Sublime Art: Towards an Aesthetics of the FutureStephen Zepke

Mallarmé and the Politics of Literature: Sartre, Kristeva, Badiou, RancièreRobert Boncardo

Animal Writing: Storytelling, Selfhood and the Limits of EmpathyDanielle Sands

Forthcoming Titles

Visual Art and Projects of the SelfKatrina Mitcheson

Music, Philosophy and Gender in Nancy, Lacoue-Labarthe, BadiouSarah Hickmott

The Desert in Modern Literature and Philosophy: Wasteland AestheticsAidan Tynan

Visit the Crosscurrents website at www.edinburghuniversitypress.com/series/CROSS

ANIMAL WRITINGStorytelling, Selfhood and

the Limits of Empathy

Danielle Sands

Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the

humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance.

For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com

© Danielle Sands, 2019

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and printed and bound in Great Britain.

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ISBN 978 1 4744 3903 9 (hardback)ISBN 978 1 4744 3905 3 (webready PDF)

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The right of Danielle Sands to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the

Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

Contents

Acknowledgements viPreface viiSeries Editor’s Preface ix

Introduction: Ten Statements about Empathy and Animal Studies 1

1. Fragile Bodies, Cross-species Empathy and Suspended Allegories: ‘It hurt, it was painful – that’s all there is to say’ 35

2. Anthropomorphism and the ‘Ends of Man’ in the Anthropocene: ‘My chimp nature’ 66

3. Telling Nonhuman Stories: ‘The secret contours of objects’ 964. The Sexual Politics of Nature Writing and Lepidoptery: ‘The

siren song of entomology’ 1265. Insect Ethics and Aesthetics: ‘Their blood does not stain our

hands’ 154

Conclusion 180

Bibliography 184Index 201

Acknowledgements

Beginning as an illicit distraction from another project, this book has been a pleasure to write from start to finish. Its completion is down to the intellectual support and inspiration offered by my wonderful students and colleagues at Royal Holloway and beyond, and to the unwavering love, faith and enthusiasm of my family and friends. Particular thanks are due to Carol Hughes, Christopher Watkin, Kirsty Woods and my anonymous readers at Edinburgh University Press, to Nick James for indexing and to Zosia Edwards for her help in prepar-ing the manuscript. Earlier versions of Chapters 1 and 2 were published elsewhere; thanks to Taylor and Francis for permission to reproduce this material here. This book would not exist without my much-missed nonhuman companions E, G, H, LBC, and N. Boundless love and gratitude to my human, AA.

Preface

This book takes its inspiration from Sianne Ngai, whose Ugly Feelings, itself a beastless ‘bestiary of affects’, traded desire, a trope rendered politically inert by its ‘semantic multiplicity, slippage and flow’, for negative affects in the pursuit of more ‘critical productivity’.1 The provocative unfashionableness of Ngai’s appeal to critique in the era of its purported ‘redundancy’ inspires this book’s critical approach to the affective leanings of animal studies.2 Contemporary animal studies, inspired by an ever-increasing list of remarkably similar ‘turns’ – materialist, bodily, vitalist, posthumanist, affective – largely adopts an affective monotone: empathy.

While not unaffected by the potency of empathy and its use as a pivot to direct animal studies beyond discourses of rights, and alert to the timely challenges to critique raised by Isabelle Stengers and others,3 this book contends that the retention of some form of critical method-ology leads neither to a ‘corrosive skepticism’4 nor to an inescapable anthropocentrism. Accordingly, it aspires to a critical distancing from the sometimes claustrophobic proximity of empathy, endeavouring to establish sufficient distance to enable the assessment of its ontological, ethical and aesthetic underpinnings without succumbing to the age-old trap of philosophical approaches to animals, which ‘prioritised a dis-embodied and affectless reason’.5 In this methodological approach, it is indebted to Jacques Derrida, whose deconstruction, often uncomfort-ably and sometimes frustratingly, is characterised by a kind of ‘double

1 Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), pp. 7, 344, 3.2 Isabelle Stengers makes this claim in In Catastrophic Times: Revisiting the Coming Barbarism,

trans. Andrew Goffey (London: Open Humanities Press, 2015), p. 11.3 See, for example, Bruno Latour’s ground-breaking essay, ‘Why Has Critique Run Out of

Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern’, Critical Inquiry, 30.2 (2004), 225–48. 4 Donna Haraway, ‘In the Beginning was the Word: The Genesis of Biological Theory’, Signs,

6.3 (1981), 469–81 (p. 478). 5 Kari Weil, ‘Empathy’, in The Edinburgh Companion to Animal Studies, ed. Ron Broglio, Undine

Sellbach and Lynn Turner (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), pp. 126–39 (p. 129).

viii Animal Writing

Series Editor’s Preface

Two or more currents flowing into or through each other create a turbulent crosscurrent, more powerful than its contributory flows and irreducible to them. Time and again, modern European thought creates and exploits crosscurrents in thinking, remaking itself as it flows through, across and against discourses as diverse as math-ematics and film, sociology and biology, theology, literature and politics. The work of Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Slavoj Žižek, Alain Badiou, Bernard Stiegler and Jean-Luc Nancy, among others, participates in this fundamental remaking. In each case disciplines and discursive formations are engaged, not with the aim of perform-ing a pre-determined mode of analysis yielding a ‘philosophy of x’, but through encounters in which thought itself can be transformed. Furthermore, these fundamental transformations do not merely seek to account for singular events in different sites of discursive or artistic production but rather to engage human existence and society as such, and as a whole. The cross-disciplinarity of this thought is therefore neither a fashion nor a prosthesis; it is simply part of what ‘thought’ means in this tradition.

Crosscurrents begins from the twin convictions that this remaking is integral to the legacy and potency of European thought, and that the future of thought in this tradition must defend and develop this legacy in the teeth of an academy that separates and controls the currents that flow within and through it. With this in view, the series provides an exceptional site for bold, original and opinion-changing monographs that actively engage European thought in this fundamentally cross- disciplinary manner, riding existing crosscurrents and creating new ones. Each book in the series explores the different ways in which European thought develops through its engagement with disciplines across the arts, humanities, social sciences and sciences, recognising that the community of scholars working with this thought is itself spread across diverse faculties. The object of the series is therefore

strategy’6 or ‘double reading’.7 As the pervasive mood of contemporary animal studies, empathy provides the starting, but not the end-point for this book, which will range across the affective spectrum, landing finally on disgust, not incidentally the ‘absolute other’ of the Kantian aesthetic system.8 Reading fiction and philosophy alongside each other, it proposes a movement, rather than a solution, a thinking of and with animals that negotiates through and aside from empathy.

6 Robert Bernasconi, ‘The Trace of Levinas in Derrida’, in Derrida and Différance, ed. David Wood and Robert Bernasconi (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988), pp. 13–29 (p. 16).

7 John Llewelyn, ‘Thresholds’, in Derrida and Différance, ed. David Wood and Robert Bernasconi (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988), pp. 51–62 (p. 61).

8 Jacques Derrida, ‘Economimesis’, trans. R. Klein, Diacritics, 11.2 (1981), 2–25 (p. 21).

Preface ix

Series Editor’s Preface

Two or more currents flowing into or through each other create a turbulent crosscurrent, more powerful than its contributory flows and irreducible to them. Time and again, modern European thought creates and exploits crosscurrents in thinking, remaking itself as it flows through, across and against discourses as diverse as math-ematics and film, sociology and biology, theology, literature and politics. The work of Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Slavoj Žižek, Alain Badiou, Bernard Stiegler and Jean-Luc Nancy, among others, participates in this fundamental remaking. In each case disciplines and discursive formations are engaged, not with the aim of perform-ing a pre-determined mode of analysis yielding a ‘philosophy of x’, but through encounters in which thought itself can be transformed. Furthermore, these fundamental transformations do not merely seek to account for singular events in different sites of discursive or artistic production but rather to engage human existence and society as such, and as a whole. The cross-disciplinarity of this thought is therefore neither a fashion nor a prosthesis; it is simply part of what ‘thought’ means in this tradition.

Crosscurrents begins from the twin convictions that this remaking is integral to the legacy and potency of European thought, and that the future of thought in this tradition must defend and develop this legacy in the teeth of an academy that separates and controls the currents that flow within and through it. With this in view, the series provides an exceptional site for bold, original and opinion-changing monographs that actively engage European thought in this fundamentally cross- disciplinary manner, riding existing crosscurrents and creating new ones. Each book in the series explores the different ways in which European thought develops through its engagement with disciplines across the arts, humanities, social sciences and sciences, recognising that the community of scholars working with this thought is itself spread across diverse faculties. The object of the series is therefore

x Animal Writing

For my parents, Catherine and Peter Sands,from whom I learned to be attentive to the natural world and its

inhabitants

nothing less than to examine and carry forward the unique legacy of European thought as an inherently and irreducibly cross-disciplinary enterprise.

Christopher WatkinCambridge

February 2011

Preface xi

For my parents, Catherine and Peter Sands,from whom I learned to be attentive to the natural world and its

inhabitants

Introduction: Ten Statements about Empathy and Animal

Studies

1 W E L I V E I N A N AG E O F E M PAT H Y

‘Empathy is the grand theme of our time’, contends Frans de Waal, pre-dicting, rather too optimistically in 2009, ‘a new epoch that stresses co-operation and social responsibility’, and tracing the physiological origins of empathy to experiences shared by humans and nonhumans alike.1 Irrespective of the accuracy of de Waal’s political forecast, empathy continues to pervade scholarship in and beyond the humanities. For Kari Weil, ‘empathy is in’, its reach stretching from economics to cognitive science, from literary theory to ethology.2 While the term itself is a recent one, and its current usage diverse and disputed, we can trace the contem-porary belief that some sense of ethical attunement can be derived from an understanding of other humans’ thoughts and feelings to two key eighteenth-century texts: David Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature (1739) and Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759),3 the latter insisting in its famous opening lines that there are principles in human nature that safeguard humans’ ‘interest in the welfare of others’.4 The term itself was coined in 1909 by Edward Titchener, a translation of the German Einfühlung, literally ‘in-feeling’ or ‘feeling-into’, a concept articulated and explored by Robert Vischer and Theodor Lipps.5

More recent engagement with empathy has seen a jockeying for position among different discourses and has generated innumerable different definitions, with emphases lying variously on the affective, cognitive or bodily.6 Identifying several different mental processes or states which, individually or in combination, fall under the empathy umbrella, Amy Coplan lists:

(A) Feeling what someone else feels (B) Caring about someone else (C) Being emotionally affected by someone else’s emotions and experiences, though

Introduction 1

Introduction: Ten Statements about Empathy and Animal

Studies

1 W E L I V E I N A N AG E O F E M PAT H Y

‘Empathy is the grand theme of our time’, contends Frans de Waal, pre-dicting, rather too optimistically in 2009, ‘a new epoch that stresses co-operation and social responsibility’, and tracing the physiological origins of empathy to experiences shared by humans and nonhumans alike.1 Irrespective of the accuracy of de Waal’s political forecast, empathy continues to pervade scholarship in and beyond the humanities. For Kari Weil, ‘empathy is in’, its reach stretching from economics to cognitive science, from literary theory to ethology.2 While the term itself is a recent one, and its current usage diverse and disputed, we can trace the contem-porary belief that some sense of ethical attunement can be derived from an understanding of other humans’ thoughts and feelings to two key eighteenth-century texts: David Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature (1739) and Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759),3 the latter insisting in its famous opening lines that there are principles in human nature that safeguard humans’ ‘interest in the welfare of others’.4 The term itself was coined in 1909 by Edward Titchener, a translation of the German Einfühlung, literally ‘in-feeling’ or ‘feeling-into’, a concept articulated and explored by Robert Vischer and Theodor Lipps.5

More recent engagement with empathy has seen a jockeying for position among different discourses and has generated innumerable different definitions, with emphases lying variously on the affective, cognitive or bodily.6 Identifying several different mental processes or states which, individually or in combination, fall under the empathy umbrella, Amy Coplan lists:

(A) Feeling what someone else feels (B) Caring about someone else (C) Being emotionally affected by someone else’s emotions and experiences, though

2 Animal Writing

not necessarily experiencing the same emotions (D) Imagining oneself in another’s situation (E) Imagining being another in that other’s situation (F) Making inferences about another’s mental states (G) Some combination of the processes described in (A)–(F).7

Coplan’s inventory reveals that empathy is used as a descriptor for both cognitive and emotional identification; accordingly, empathy raises questions that cut across the sciences, social sciences and humanities. These include: What role does cognition play in empathy? How do the sensory, emotional and cognitive components of empathy interrelate? Is empathy comparable with ‘emotional contagion’?8 Is it imitative? How do we ascertain if our empathy is accurate? Does empathy have a moral value and should its cultivation be encouraged? Does the concept of empathy presuppose a certain model of subjectivity that requires a clear differentiation between self and other? Perceiving ‘experiential understanding’ as central to our understanding of empathy, Coplan herself settles on a tripartite definition: ‘only empathy that combines affective matching, other-oriented perspective-taking, and self–other differentiation provides experiential understanding’, she insists.9

Discussions of empathy raise, rather than resolve, complex questions regarding the relationship between human cognition, emotion and imagination. While in her discussion of literary empathy, Suzanne Keen describes empathy as ‘a vicarious, spontaneous sharing of affect’, psy-chologists’ and cognitive scientists’ definitions suggest that the affective dimension of empathy already presupposes cognitive engagement.10 For Nancy Eisenberg, for example, empathy is ‘an affective response that stems from the apprehension or comprehension of another’s emo-tional state or condition, and that is identical or very similar to what the other person is feeling or would be expected to feel’.11 Thus, ‘it is evident that any sophisticated empathizing requires more advanced cognitive capacities’.12 The long-held distinction between cognitive empathy (‘awareness of another person’s internal states’) and affective empathy (‘the vicarious affective response to another person’),13 while significant for specific disciplinary approaches, may well prove to be of limited use, not least because our sense of the moral value of empathy assumes a connection between the two. ‘Both processes are crucial for our emotional understanding of others’, Alexa Weik von Mossner contends, and for Elisa Aaltola, their separation can have ‘devastatingly dangerous consequences’.14

Complex manifestations of empathy evidently combine cognitive and affective processes. Scientific attention to the specificity of these processes has lent deeper understanding to the differences and similari-ties between human and nonhuman primates. The discovery of mirror

Introduction 3

neurons by neuroscientists in the 1980s and 1990s exposed automatic imitation as a rudimentary mechanism among both, and generated deeper understanding of both human infant development15 and of non-human primates.16 ‘Our brains’, Antonio Gallese writes, ‘and those of other primates, have developed a basic functional mechanism, embod-ied simulation, which gives us an experiential insight of other minds.’17 While mirror neuron enthusiasts have made bold claims, including, as Derek Matravers comments, ‘that simulation is what grounds interper-sonal understanding’, we must interrogate the assumptions underpin-ning these claims and beware both of posing scientific solutions to philosophical questions and of substituting scientific conceptions of subjectivity for philosophical ones.18

It is nonetheless true that science can assist in the framing of philo-sophical questions and in considering the role and development of the self in different empathetic modes. The distinction between automatic ‘emotional contagion (which involves the spontaneous transfer of emotion)’, evident for example in macaque monkeys, and ‘imagina-tive perspective-taking (which involves perspective-swapping or role-taking)’, visible so far only in chimpanzees and humans, appears to reflect a discrepancy between animals that do not have a distinct sense of self and those that do.19 The former does not require that the empa-thiser distinguish her feelings from those of the empathised; rather, as Kristin Andrews and Lori Gruen note, ‘an awareness of this distinction in agency may not yet have developed and perhaps never will’.20 As such, unlike imaginative perspective-taking, emotional contagion is best understood as complete identification or immersion. In contrast, as imaginative perspective-taking, ‘empathy must involve a clear differ-entiation between the sphere of the self as opposed to the sphere of the other’.21 It is, therefore, a kind of doubling, which ‘involves a participa-tory enactment of the situation of the sufferer, but is always combined with the awareness that one is not oneself the sufferer’.22

While the distinction between sympathy and empathy is a recent one, it has proven invaluable to critics assessing the moral value of the latter. Whereas empathy requires an imaginative engagement which presupposes both a clear distinction and an affective or creative poros-ity between subjects, sympathy does not possess the same dynamism. Rather, it means ‘having concern for another’s well-being’,23 or experi-encing ‘a particular kind of emotion’.24 It does not demand what Neil Roughley and Thomas Schramme call ‘an affect transfer mechanism’,25 but entails an additional level of detachment; it is ‘not so much a matter of feeling someone’s pain as of feeling bad or regretful about the pain someone is feeling’.26 It is even possible, as Derek Matravers suggests,

4 Animal Writing

‘to feel sympathy towards someone who is not themselves feeling an emotion’.27

Although the difference between empathy and sympathy is largely undisputed, their respective ethical merits are not. For Martin L. Hoffman, empathy is ‘the bedrock of morality, the glue of society, and an important factor in changing laws and society in a prosocial and projustice direction’.28 Dan Batson has endeavoured to empiri-cally prove the ethical value of empathy via his ‘empathy-altruism hypothesis’ in which ‘empathetic concern refers to other-oriented emo-tion elicited by and congruent with the perceived welfare of a person in need’.29 Others are more sceptical; for Julinna C. Oxley, empathy ‘is not intrinsically moral and does not always lead to moral thought or action’.30 Such concerns will be further explored later. For Daryl Koehn, the superiority of empathy over sympathy is proved by the latter’s deficiencies; sympathy ‘cannot be relied upon to provide any real insight into [others’] life experiences’, she asserts.31 Peter Goldie inverts this perspective entirely; empathy does not necessitate sympathy or altruism, he argues; rather, ‘you can imagine the other’s suffering, yet simply disregard it, or you might empathize with a person who has committed a terrible crime, yet feel no sympathy for you think he thor-oughly deserves his punishment’.32 Irrespective of their ethical virtues, the entanglement between the two is clear; empathy, Batson contends, ‘helps to power and sustain sympathy’.33

2 T H E AG E O F E M PAT H Y I S L I N K E D TO T H E A F F E C T I V E T U R N

From Lipps to phenomenologists such as Edmund Husserl and Edith Stein, and to contemporary analytic philosophers, cognitive empa-thy provides a tool for addressing the problem of other minds. Characterising this position and objecting to the recent prioritisation of the affective over the cognitive, Karsten Stueber writes: ‘Empathy as understood within the original philosophical context is best seen as a form of inner or mental imitation for the purpose of gaining knowledge of other minds.’34 While this approach continues in contemporary ana-lytic philosophy, it is marginalised in other disciplines as it presupposes a distinction between mind and body which has been problematised both in and beyond philosophy. In other disciplines, the shift in focus from cognitive to affective empathy (or to some combination of the two) reflects a broader interest in affect. As such, insofar as ‘The Age of Empathy’35 addresses affective, rather than cognitive empathy, it is clearly allied with the ‘Episteme of the Affect’.36

Introduction 5

The latter episteme is at once determined by a rejection of earlier paradigms – deconstruction, with its perceived preoccupation with language, and ‘psychoanalysis, and psychoanalytic concepts of fantasy and desire’37 – and the adoption of new source material. For theories of affect, the two central sources are generally understood to be Gilles Deleuze’s lectures on Spinoza in 1978, in which he recuperates the concept of affectus,38 and the work of Silvan Tomkins, popularised by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank in 1995, with their publica-tion of Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader. As attested to by affect theorists such as Lisa Blackman and Teresa Brennan, with the latter insisting that ‘all affects [. . .] are material physiological things’ and contending that the ‘transmission of affect’ demands increased attentiveness to the complex, multi-directional interaction between the biological and the social, the turn to affect can be fruitfully read within a larger theoretical re-engagement with the body and materiality.39

While Brian Massumi, for example, resists the conflation of affect and emotion, contending that ‘emotion is a very partial expression of affect’,40 it is important to retain the tension within the concept of affect between its interruptive force, both material and conceptual, and the inevitable domestication of this force through its expression in pre-existing conceptual (and emotional) forms. Pieter Vermeulen acknowledges this interruptive force; for him, affect names the ‘formal operations that aim to undo emotional codification’.41 The understand-ing of affect as interruptive can be traced from Spinoza to Deleuze and is frequently articulated through a Deleuzian vocabulary of intensities, assemblages and becoming. According to Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, affect is

integral to a body’s perpetual becoming (always becoming otherwise, how-ever subtly, than what it already is), pulled beyond its seeming surface-boundedness by way of its relation to, indeed its composition through, the forces of encounter. With affect, a body is as much outside itself as in itself – webbed in its relations – until ultimately such firm distinctions cease to matter.42

Going beyond the mutuality and vulnerability of affect – that affecting means ‘at the same time opening yourself up to being affected in turn’43 – Gregg and Seigworth suggest that affect necessitates a relational ontology in which subjects and bodies are understood as products, rather than generators, of relations. Other thinkers vary in their emphases. Some, such as Tonya K. Davidson, Ondine Park and Rob Shields, writing in the collection Ecologies of Affect, move from the individual to the collective, with affect serving as ‘the emotional “glue” that drive[s] bodies to assemble into collectives’ and being therefore

6 Animal Writing

inextricably connected to ‘ecology’.44 Vermeulen similarly notes that ‘affect dissolves the self-contained interiority of the individual and opens it to new connections and combinations’.45 The slippage between affect and emotion is again significant. Resisting one pole of scholar-ship that insists that emotions dwell in the individual, and another that claims that emotions are purely social, Sara Ahmed insists that the distinction between the individual and social is both constructed and malleable; emotions, she writes, ‘work to shape the “surfaces” of indi-vidual and collective bodies’, and in so doing, influence the orientation and ‘reorientation’ of all bodies.46 While there are explicit similarities between these positions, the turn to affect, as Eugenie Brinkema notes, has ‘always been plural’, and differences of inflection result in notably diverse outcomes.47 Affect theory, therefore, covers a range of perspec-tives from the unchallenging celebration of individual emotional experi-ence to the interrogation of a biopolitics which precedes and determines the construction of bodies, and to non-anthropocentric ontologies which aspire to radical engagement with, for example, the nonorganic and the technological.48

3 A F F E C T P RO M I S E S M O R E T H A N I T D E L I V E RS

For Brinkema, affect theory is disingenuous and disappointing. She argues:

the return to affect on the part of critics [. . .] is, in most cases, a naïve move that leaves intact the very ideological, aesthetic and theoretical problems it claimed to confront. Thus, even some of the most radical theory coming out of the humanities today begins with the premise that affects and feelings are the forgotten underside of the linguistic turn. Indeed in some cases the affec-tion for affect has itself been subsumed by a more powerful yearning for a standing before or outside of that very moment in theory that demanded the deep attention required for interminable difficult reading.49

The denial that we are inheritors of deconstruction is now widespread in the humanities, voiced by thinkers as diverse as Slavoj Žižek, Rosi Braidotti, Alain Badiou, Quentin Meillassoux and Donna Haraway. For new materialists, affect theorists and posthumanists, the articula-tion of deconstruction’s alleged redundancy is particularly important and urgent. Rosi Braidotti, for example, insists that the ‘posthuman subject’ is not ‘post-structuralist, because it does not function within the linguistic turn or other forms of deconstruction’.50 The rejection of deconstruction (often accompanied by a denial of the problems that it purports to address) facilitates a swift passage through (or rather around) taxing problems. For Braidotti, the conflation of deconstruc-

Introduction 7

tion with the linguistic turn permits a dismissal of the former as anthropocentric navel-gazing, evading discussion of the ways in which deconstruction requires us to pause before endorsing materiality, affect or posthumanism. For Žižek, the disavowal of deconstruction enables the pursuit of an overtly political philosophy unencumbered by ‘the unstable and unlocatable border between law and justice, between the political and the ultrapolitical’.51 While the shift away from deconstruc-tion simplifies the relationship between the philosophical and the politi-cal, it does so, in Brinkema’s terms, at the expense of ‘the deep attention required for interminable difficult reading’. While new materialisms and posthumanisms often frame themselves as post-theoretical, in the sense of being informed but not limited by theory, Pieter Vermeulen contends that many position affect as ‘a biological bedrock’ which is ‘blissfully untainted by signification, intention, and mediation’ and thus reinstate a ‘strict separation between affect and consciousness’ which gives affect unmediated access to materiality and therefore immunity to critique.52 Their post-theoretical stance, therefore, is no such thing.

Recent dismissals of deconstruction have a familiar flavour. Defending poststructuralism against the connected charges that either it cannot offer an account of emotion, or that its account of emotion directly conflicts with its deconstruction of the subject, in 2001 Rei Terada contended both that poststructuralism is pervaded by emotion and that it successfully demonstrates that emotion is fundamentally ‘nonsubjec-tive’.53 Terada’s temporally transferable insight is that deconstruction’s critics routinely pathologise deconstruction, contending that it is trapped by its own non-problems, in order to neutralise the genuine issues that it raises. The task for deconstruction’s defenders is to reinstate these prob-lems as problems; in Terada’s case, she reminds us that the ‘difficulty of representing emotion, in other words, is the difficulty of knowing what it is, not just for poststructuralist theory but for any theory’.54

Brinkema contends that affect theory promises much and delivers little. The historical turn to affect, where affect is allied with materi-ality and the body, marks the moment where Derridean thinking is superseded by Deleuze, with the ‘polemical effect of Deleuze’s theory of affect’, Terada noting, being to produce a schism within poststruc-turalism along the lines of ‘positions on emotive experience’.55 For Brinkema, Deleuze’s employment of Spinoza’s notion of affectus is ultimately unsatisfactory; while the lineage from Spinoza, Bergson and Whitehead to Deleuze incites a rethinking of bodies as ‘assemblages of human and non-human processes’56 in which the boundaries between bodies are exposed as porous and rich with forces, intensities and affects,57 Brinkema argues that ‘Deleuze loses the subject only to hold

8 Animal Writing

tight to the body’.58 This is magnified by many of Deleuze’s inheritors, whose focus on the body often returns to individual visceral experience and emotion, and in so doing, Brinkema contends, retains ‘a notion of classical interiority’.59 Rather than repudiating affect entirely, however, we can recover its potential for radicalism. This, Brinkema argues, like Vermeulen who also advocates a return to form, can only be generated by attention to ‘its specificities’.60 In its reading of the domesticated affects of animal studies, this book will keep in mind the possibility of a more interruptive kind of affect which is ‘non-intentional’ and ‘indifferent’.61

4 A N I M A L S T U D I E S H A S T R A D E D R I G H T S F O R R E L AT I O N S

The empathetic mood that pervades contemporary animal studies is a recent development.62 Early texts that asserted the ethical status of animals, notably Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation (1975) and Tom Regan’s The Case for Animal Rights (1983), emerged from the rights-tradition and remained within it. Singer popularised the term specie-sism and proposed that the ability of a nonhuman animal to experience suffering, and thus its interest in avoiding it, should be safeguarded in law as a right. The recent shift, identified by Anat Pick as one from ‘rights to lives’, signifies a thoroughgoing change in thinking about animals, ostensibly away from anthropocentrism and to a broader, less subject-centric conception of ethical value.63 It looks to advance a different approach to animals, primarily informed by continental rather than analytic philosophy, without entirely dismissing the gains of rights-based approaches. It understands relationality in ontological, ethical and political terms.

The limitations of rights-based approaches have been effectively articulated in other political contexts. For the political theorist Hannah Arendt, the naturalisation of human rights is misleading and danger-ous; rights, as we understand them, depend upon the ‘right to have rights’.64 They are meaningless unless they are recognised by function-ing political communities. Simone Weil also reminds us that human rights can be traced to Roman property law and in it, the perception of human slaves as property:

The notion of rights is linked with the notion of sharing out, of exchange, of measured quantity. It has a commercial flavour, essentially evocative of legal claims and arguments. Rights are always asserted in a tone of contention; and when this tone is adopted, it must rely upon force in the background, or else it will be laughed at.65

Introduction 9

For Weil and others, justice cannot be reduced to the juridical. As Cora Diamond, following Weil, argues, ‘when genuine issues of justice and injustice are framed in terms of rights, they are thereby distorted and trivialised’.66 Other problems arise with rights-discourse within the con-text of animal studies. Rights presuppose an individual human subject who is discrete, autonomous and rational. As Deborah Slicer writes, this ‘atomistic bundle of interests’ is the sole unit ‘that the justice tradition recognizes as the basis for moral considerableness’.67 This approach might lead to the inclusion of the great apes and other intelligent or sentient mammals within the ethical sphere, but, in continuing to assess mammals anthropocentrically, would inevitably omit those insufficiently rational, at least by human standards. Such a model of subjectivity has been effectively dismissed by animal studies; as Donna Haraway writes in Staying with the Trouble, ‘bounded individualism in its many flavors in science, politics, and philosophy has finally become unavailable to think with, truly no longer thinkable, technically or any other way’.68

We can also read the abstract argumentation favoured by rights-based approaches as reinforcing a ‘deflection’ from embodiment that has long characterised, and thus limited, philosophical thought.69 Such an approach, visible in a Cartesianism which dismissed animals as machines, both renders animal suffering invisible (because inconceiv-able) and distances humans from their own embodied experience, ‘of what it is’, Cora Diamond stresses, ‘to be a living animal’.70 Despite appeals to a broader set of criteria (or even an entire conceptual over-haul), rights-based thinkers have continued to insist on the ongoing value of abstraction and rationality for making ethical judgments; as Tom Regan sternly insists:

Since all who work on behalf of the interests of animals are more than a little familiar with the tired charges of being “irrational,” “sentimental,” “emo-tional,” or worse, we can give the lie to these accusations only by making a concerted effort not to indulge our emotions or sentiments.71

The intransigence of Regan, who, even writing in 2001, simply could not conceive of ‘a theory of animal rights based on appeals to emo-tion’, marks the opening of a gulf:72 on one side, a rights-discourse whose gains for nonhuman animals cannot be overstated, and on the other, an unexpected alliance between a ‘continental’ thought aligned with the body and affect and an ethological discourse, epitomised by Marc Bekoff and Frans de Waal, increasingly keen to affirm the value of emotional and anthropomorphic approaches to nonhuman life.73 It is striking that animal studies is now overwhelmingly characterised by the latter.

10 Animal Writing

5 A N I M A L S T U D I E S I S U N D E R P I N N E D B Y R E L AT I O N A L I T Y

Contemporary animal studies is the site of numerous correctives. That philosophy’s historical misrepresentation of ‘the animal’ is tied to a fet-ishisation of reason accompanied by a denigration of the body was ably demonstrated by Jacques Derrida in The Animal That Therefore I Am, a text promising a deconstructive inscription ‘in the name of another history, another concept of history, and of the history of the human as well as that of reason’.74 Animal studies has looked to address these deficiencies and others, including the neglect of ‘sensing, [. . .] desire, passion, sexuality, and relations of dependency’.75 Theorisations of the shift from ‘bounded individualism’ to ‘relations of depend-ency’ draw upon a variety of discourses including Actor Network Theory (Latour), new materialisms and posthumanism (Braidotti, Barad, Bennett, Grosz, Haraway), the affective turn and its focus on embodiment (Gruen, Alaimo), deconstructive readings of precarity and vulnerability (Derrida, Butler, Wolfe) and feminist care ethics (Tronto, Gilligan). Emerging in the 1980s and 1990s, the latter began from ‘the fact of human interdependence’, cautioning against the danger of perceiving it ‘a weakness to be unable to live a totally self-sufficient life devoid of emotional attachments’.76 While not all of these thinkers endorse a relational ontology, entanglement has become the primary mode for thinking subjectivity and agency within animal studies. This is epitomised by Braidotti’s account of the critical posthumanist subject, who exists ‘within an eco-philosophy of multiple belongings, as a relational subject that works across differences and is also internally differentiated but still grounded and accountable’.77

The widespread objectification of animal life, predicated on the per-vasiveness of a subject/object binary in which only the former possesses agency, has historically licensed the abuse of animal life. Such a binary, Bruno Latour argues, is ‘less interesting than the complete chain along which competences and actions are distributed’.78 Through his Actor Network Theory, a key influence on new materialisms and posthuman-isms, Latour argued that the subject/object opposition is a secondary consequence of distributed agency rather than a primary ontological descriptor. Advancing the term ‘actant’ to signify the distribution of agency across human and nonhuman networks, Latour frames humans as complex material systems rather than ensouled subjects. He argues that the simultaneous denial of human embeddedness within networks (with humans as networks) and reliance on such networks constitutes the conflicting logic of modernity, and has sustained the conceptual

Introduction 11

and material hierarchy underpinning anthropogenic environmental destruction.79 Like Latour, reaching for a more distributive agency, Jane Bennett’s vital materialism foresees the political implications of a flattened ontology in which the opposition between human agency and ‘passive, mechanistic’ matter is displaced by the claim that all matter possesses ‘thing-power’ and that agency is spread across a range ‘of ontological types’.80 Bennett rejects the classical, theologically informed notion of the subject and its ethical responsibilities; by her account, the ‘mingling’ between humanity and nonhumanity can no longer be ignored.81 The political shift is notable; one is no longer individually responsible for one’s actions, but responsible for the consequences of the ‘assemblages’ with which one finds oneself implicated.82

Now presupposed by animal studies, the distribution of agency across species (and beyond) and the emergence of dynamic subjects from cross-species networks has precipitated a fast-moving vocabulary. Donna Haraway insists upon the co-constitution of interacting beings, Alexis Shotwell describes corporeal ‘inter-absorption’ as ‘the way things actually are’, and Stacy Alaimo coins the phrase ‘trans-corporeality’ to describe cross-species material entanglements.83 Haraway’s work in particular has been crucial in exploring the ontological and ethical implications of cross-species entanglement. As early as ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’, a text whose engagement with animals is chiefly implicit, Haraway insists upon the figure of the cyborg as an intervention in human–animal relations as it exposes the originary hybridity of the human (denied in the very functioning of the human/animal distinction) through its constitution via technological prostheses. It is no accident, Haraway notes, that ‘the cyborg appears in myth precisely where the boundary between human and animal is transgressed’.84 Accordingly, the sovereign human individual is a myth; ‘no species’, she writes, ‘not even our own arrogant one pretending to be good individuals in so-called modern Western scripts, acts alone; assemblages of organic species and of abiotic actors make history’.85 We must begin not from the individual, but from entanglement, as biological, social and histori-cal co-constitution means that ‘beings do not pre-exist their relatings’.86 Similarly, Elisa Aaltola argues for the replacement of ‘the atomistic model’ by ‘intersubjectivity, the idea that we constantly evolve in rela-tion to others, are impacted by and open to those others and due to this dynamic, also capable of understanding them’.87

12 Animal Writing

6 A N I M A L S T U D I E S C H A L L E N G E S T H E D I S T I N C T I O N B E T W E E N O N TO L O G Y

A N D E T H I C S

Critiquing abstract rights-based methodologies on the grounds that ‘moral theories might alienate us from possible solutions to moral prob-lems’, Lori Gruen proposes an approach which accepts, rather than denies, our proximity and relatedness to nonhuman animals.88 This she terms ‘entangled empathy’ and explains:

Entangled empathy: a type of caring perception focused on attending to another’s experience of wellbeing. An experiential process involving a blend of emotion and cognition in which we recognize we are in relationships with others and are called upon to be responsive and responsible in these relation-ships, by attending to another’s needs, and interests, desires, vulnerabilities, hopes and sensitivities.89

For Gruen, empathy, an ethical attitude, is the appropriate response to the ontological condition of entanglement. Gruen’s notion of empathy corresponds with Coplan’s definition, which presupposes some degree of ‘self–other differentiation’, rather than total enmeshment. Gruen’s position addresses the ways in which the insights of an ‘ethics of care’ originating in 1990s and 2000s feminism, and re-emerging in recent work such as that of Michael Slote, can be fruitfully recuperated for animal studies.90 Such an ethics is ripe for adaptation. For Joan C. Tronto, writing in the 1990s, care already implies ‘engagement’, movement beyond the self, and a call ‘to some type of action’.91 She observes that ‘it is not restricted to human interaction with others’, but might include, for example, ‘caring [. . .] for the environment’.92 Gruen’s gesture towards this scholarship is strengthened and extended by Maria Puig de la Bellacasa in her 2017 book Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds. Drawing deeply on the feminist care tradition, Bellacasa pitches her position as a counter to normative moral theories, contending that a care position mobilises holistic, yet relational, selves rather than being exclusively cognitively grounded. Care is, therefore, ‘about thick, impure involvement’ and ‘a hands-on ongoing process of re-creation’.93 Such a position requires a comprehensive revaluation of ethical standards, with ‘respect for and attentiveness to possible difference’ replacing ‘formal consistency’ as the ‘hallmark of ethical maturity’.94 Whereas for Gruen and others such as Alexis Shotwell, who advances an ‘ethics of entanglement’, the ethical remains clearly distinguishable from the ontological, Bellacasa positions relationality or interdependency on the mutable borderline between the two.95

Introduction 13

‘Interdependency’, Bellacasa maintains, ‘is not a contract, nor a moral ideal – it is a condition. Care is therefore concomitant to the continuation of life for many living beings in more than human entanglements – not forced upon them by a moral order, and not necessarily a rewarding obligation.’96 Bellacasa’s primary assumption here is an ontological one, that relationality is ‘all there is’, and that consequently, ‘nonsymmetrical, multilateral, asubjective, obligations [. . .] are distributed across more than human materialities and exist-ences’.97 Obligation is here ambiguous: Bellacasa exploits its double functioning as, on the one hand, a survival necessity, and on the other, ethical responsibility. This facilitates her next move, which is to present ontological dependency as an ethical model; there is further slippage here, from what is natural to what is good. A similar unexplained slip-page occurs in Haraway’s recent work on cross-species kinship; ‘all earthlings are kin in the deepest sense’, she asserts, before inferring that this obliges us to ‘make kin, not babies!’98

The problem with such claims is not that they politicise ontology. Indeed, a great strength of the work of Haraway, Barad and others is the exposure of the political stakes of existing ontologies, particularly those whose interests lie in the differentiation of humans from other animals. Rather, the problem with such claims is that they depoliticise their own ontologies. Bellacasa disavows the political stakes of her own position; fulfilling Brinkema and Vermeulen’s critiques of affect theory, she argues that her ontology strips back the veils of prior ontologies to expose ‘all there is’. Alert to the consequences of the feminist care ethics of the 1980s and 1990s, Daryl Koehn is cautious, reminding us that ‘the care ethic thus tends to undermine any sense of female power and freedom at the same time as it celebrates the fulfillment and strength allegedly achieved through caring’.99

In challenging Bellacasa’s claims, I do not assume that all ontologies are equally valid or equally fruitful: clearly, recent scientific advance-ments have rendered previously imperceptible connections visible and certain ontologies prove more responsive to these discoveries than others. However, this puts us in no position to declare that we have now discovered and understand the nature of reality in itself, and that our preferred ontology is non-ideological. Advocating a similarly relational ontology to that of Bellacasa, Jane Bennett admits a strategic prag-matism. ‘Why advocate the vitality of matter?’ she asks, ‘because my hunch is that the image of dead or thoroughly instrumentalized matter feeds human hubris and our earth-destroying fantasies of conquest and consumption’.100 Similarly, when asked to adjudicate between ontolo-gies, Joanna Zylinska observes that ‘the distinction between process

14 Animal Writing

and entity is therefore a heuristic, a conceptual device that helps us grasp the world and respond to it, while at the same time moving in it and being moved by it’.101 The operative value of an ontology is deter-mined by a range of factors. It is, therefore, important to highlight the complex relations between ontology, ethics and politics. This accounts for Karen Barad’s appeal to an ‘ethico-onto-epistem-ology – an appre-ciation of the intertwining of ethics, knowing and being’ on the grounds that ‘the becoming of the world is a deeply ethical matter’.102 We must be cautious when evaluating ontological frameworks in terms of verac-ity; more useful are pragmatic evaluations of their functionality. In his defence of an Object-Oriented Philosophy, for example, Graham Harman argues that ‘the primacy of relations over things is no longer a liberating idea (since it reduces things to their pragmatic impact on humans and on each other)’.103 A similar position is espoused by Claire Colebrook, who asks:

What if all the current counter-Cartesian, post-Cartesian or anti-Cartesian figures of living systems (along with a living order that is one interconnected and complex mesh) were a way of avoiding the extent to which man is a theoretical animal, a myopically and malevolently self-enclosed machine whose world he will always view as present for his own edification?104

Sceptical of claims regarding the objective veracity of any single ontol-ogy and alert to the complexity of relations between ontology, ethics and politics, this book will assess ontological claims strategically and pragmatically.

7 A N I M A L S T U D I E S E X P O S E S C RO S S - S P E C I E S V U L N E R A B I L I T Y TO I N C I T E C RO S S - S P E C I E S

E M PAT H Y

The perceived distinction between humans and other animals is under-pinned by the historical framing of Man as zoon logon echon, a rational animal whose cognitive capacities both supplement and correct his animal nature. Retaining the focus on reason, rights-based approaches to nonhuman animal life have identified similarities between human and nonhuman cognition, often tracing the evolutionary origins of cognition to provide a counter to the association of rationality with an immaterial soul. More consonant with broader movements in contem-porary animal studies is the shift in focus from cognition to sentience, signalled by Derrida’s 1997 rearticulation of Jeremy Bentham’s 1823 question ‘Can they suffer?’105 Rather than framing his call to sentience as an appeal to pity, which would reinforce the power imbalance pre-supposed by the human/animal distinction, or proposing an objective

Introduction 15

assessment of each species’ sentience, Derrida advocates an affective awareness of the shared experience of exposure, vulnerability and ‘non-power’ that defines all mortal, embodied beings.106 The affective experience of shared embodiment provides a visceral rebuttal to the assumption that ‘power over the animal is [. . .] the essence of the human’.107 Such an admission offers the possibility of grounding an alternative politics in embodied vulnerability and empathy, rather than human sovereignty:

Being able to suffer is no longer a power; it is a possibility without power, a possibility of the impossible. Mortality resides there, as the most radical means of thinking the finitude that we share with animals, the mortality that belongs to the very finitude of life, to the experience of compassion [. . .]108

While the apparently arbitrary reinscription of the human/animal distinction by biopolitical technologies – which render us ‘all always already (potential) “animals” before the law’ – often has devastat-ing effects, in its mobility this distinction is exposed as ‘a discursive resource, not a zoological designation’.109 Without endorsing the abuses of biopolitical thinking, or following Giorgio Agamben in a ‘condemnation and disavowal of embodied life as something con-stitutively deficient’, we can use biopolitics to see the ways in which acknowledgement of the animal vulnerability of the human deflates the exceptionalist fantasies of Cartesian Man, and, as Cary Wolfe suggests, enables us to articulate ‘the disjunctive and uneven quality of our own political moment’.110 Derrida’s appeal for the replacement of a politics of power by one that exposes shared vulnerability demands the ongo-ing deconstruction of the oppositions that shore up anthropocentric hegemony.

Inevitably, given current animal studies’ engagement with embodi-ment and relationality, Derrida’s focus on embodied vulnerability both reflects and informs recent work. Proceeding from a new materialist rather than a deconstructive position, Stacy Alaimo echoes Derrida’s stress on cross-species vulnerability and his aspiration towards a post-sovereign politics established not from the figure of Man as zoon logon echon, but through awareness of humans as affecting and affected bodies. We should ‘occupy exposure as insurgent vulnerability’, Alaimo contends.111 Similarly, Myra J. Hird calls for ‘an environmental ethics of vulnerability in which humans are vulnerable to living and nonliving earth processes. [. . .] This vulnerability, in turn, calls for a heightened, not diminished, assumption of responsibility.’112 On these grounds, we should aspire to an empathy which is grounded in embodied, affective experience; ‘at its most basic level’, James Mensch observes, ‘empathy is bodily. Another person hurts his hand and we reach for our own.

16 Animal Writing

We see someone cut himself and we wince. In each case, we take on the other’s embodiment.’113

Of recent interventions, that of Anat Pick in Creaturely Poetics is among the most persuasive. Informed by the work of Simone Weil and Emmanuel Levinas on vulnerability and alterity respectively, Pick outlines an ethics of vulnerability – where vulnerability is irreducible to sentience – which incorporates human and nonhuman life. Given their shared inspiration in the work of Weil, it is unsurprising that there are parallels between Diamond and Pick, with the former reminding us of the stakes of our physical vulnerability:

The awareness we each have of being a living body, being ‘alive to the world,’ carries with it exposure to the bodily sense of vulnerability to death, sheer animal vulnerability, the vulnerability we share with them. This vul-nerability is capable of panicking us.114

Like Diamond, for whom ‘moral thought gets no grip’ on our experi-ence of the fragility entailed by embodiment,115 Pick insists that we resist the desire to defuse vulnerability by codifying it or responding with a moral prescription, instead retaining its affective power.116 ‘Vulnerability as an object of attention does not yield a moral “read-ing”’, she argues. ‘I am interested instead in the ramifications (for thought and also for action) of being oriented toward vulnerability as a universal mode of exposure.’117 One limitation of Pick’s position is her tendency, like Bellacasa, to reach for an essentialist ontology to secure the ethical strength of her claims; unable to rely on the force of her position despite its contingency (ultimately, the best for which we can hope), Pick insists that ‘exposure [. . .] is the properly universal condi-tion that underlies the ordinariness of all life’.118 There is also a danger that Pick’s universalising move, in combination with her resistance to moral prescriptivism, devalues the ethical charge of her account: if exposure is both the condition of life and generates an ethical claim, to whom do we owe what? How should we discriminate between moral claims? This reflects a problem that characterises ‘entangled ethics’: how do we translate the demands created by interdependency into a political and juridical context that remains dominated by ‘bounded individualism’?

8 A R E L AT I O N A L O N TO L O G Y I S N OT S U F F I C I E N T

While these questions remain largely unaddressed, and often unac-knowledged, within animal studies, a key issue – that of accounting for

Introduction 17

an interdependency that entails vulnerability without ceding calls for ‘bodily integrity and self-determination’ – is fruitfully raised by Judith Butler in the context of human precarity.119 For Butler, interdepend-ency is a problem that, she admits, ‘I confess to not knowing how to theorize’.120 By her account, the ontological is always already political. While interdependency names ‘a common human vulnerability, one that emerges with life itself’, ‘life’ is, for Butler, always already social life.121 As such, she argues,

each of us is constituted politically in part by virtue of the social vulnerabil-ity of our bodies [. . .] Loss and vulnerability seem to follow from our being socially constituted bodies, attached to others, at risk of losing those attach-ments, exposed to others, at risk of violence by virtue of that exposure.122

Here, while the emphasis is on the social rather than biological, like Haraway and others, Butler’s account of the constitution of subjectivity is grounded in relationality.

Alert to criticisms of her ‘overly hasty association of agency with per-sonhood’,123 Butler undertakes a distinct shift to recognise the ‘precarity of any and all living beings’ without endorsing ‘radical substitutability’ across species.124 Stressing that ethical obligation is not reducible to, but should never be separated from, the politico-juridical, that ontol-ogy cannot be thought ‘outside the operations of power’, Butler aims to articulate what it might mean for beings to be ‘bound to one another in precariousness’ in a mode that ‘precedes contracts’, and how best we might respond juridically to that ‘binding’ without appropriating or domesticating it.125 Her methodological solution is unmistakably deconstructive; rather than jettisoning the figure of the independent human entirely (a position exemplified by Braidotti’s posthumanist sub-ject), she proceeds using two apparently conflicting ontologies. Alert to the fact that ‘it is important to claim that our bodies are in some sense our own and that we are entitled to claim rights of autonomy over our bodies’,126 she sustains some connection with ‘bounded individualism’, while continuing to assert the primacy of the ‘dependency, contiguity and unrivalled proximity that now defines each population, which exposes each to the fear of destruction [. . .]’.127 It is important to note, however, that, contra Bellacasa and Haraway, she politicises rather than naturalises relationality, alert to the political dangers of asserting that relations are ‘all there is’.

The editors of a recent volume locating itself in ‘multispecies studies’ made the following claim for their discipline:

Refusing the tired opposition between three incommensurable demands – social justice in a humanist vein, ethics focused on the well-being of

18 Animal Writing

individual entities (usually nonhuman animals but to a lesser extent plants, fungi, stones, and others), and an environmental ethics concerned primarily with the health of ecosystems and species – work in multispecies studies has embraced relational ethical approaches to grapple with diverse competing claims.128

The problem with this solution is that rather than evenly adjudicating between differing demands, or deconstructing the oppositions between them, by adopting relationality as its mode it already favours relational entities over individual ones. It proposes an easy solution where only a difficult one, Brinkema’s ‘deep attention’, will have any chance of success. Similarly, Haraway proceeds from the physical and biological proximity of humans and nonhumans, ‘the extraordinary tentacular closeness of processes of semiosis and fleshliness’, to a suspicion, ‘at the level of both affect and cognitive apparatus [. . .] of the division between the human and everybody else’.129 Accordingly, she proposes an ethics and politics grounded in proximity or cross-species kinship, from which the figure of the human is largely absent. On the contrary, Butler argues for a selective, strategic retention of the human. To disavow the term is to let its power continue unchecked. Rather we should perceive the human as ‘a differential of power that we must learn to read, to assess culturally and politically, and to oppose in its differential operations’, as well as ‘to assert it precisely where it cannot be asserted, and to do this in the name of opposing the differential of power by which it operates’.130 History, which reveals both the oppres-sive and liberatory power of the figure of the human, should direct us in the dilemmas we face here. ‘How does one object to human suffering’, Butler asks, ‘without perpetuating a form of anthropocentrism that has so readily been used for destructive purposes?’131 One solution is to continue the ongoing process of remaking and redefining the human, rather than letting it be defined by sovereignty and exceptionalism; in itself, the human is not a figure of self-identity or sameness. Rather, as Butler highlights, ‘where there is the human, there is the inhuman’.132 This book will pursue the ethical implications of this claim.

The ethical limitations of relationality are also exposed by a philoso-phy of empathy. We have already seen that empathy entails a kind of double perspective and that the ‘intersubjectivity in empathy is most easily captured by positing a strong mental divide between oneself and another’.133 This structural necessity is also an ethical one; blurring the identities of empathiser and empathised makes it impossible to discern how to proceed ethically. This marks the difference between emotional contagion, where there is ‘little or no self–other differentiation [. . .] and no imaginative component’, and therefore little ethical potential,

Introduction 19

and imaginative perspective-taking empathy.134 In proceeding from ‘the otherness of the other’,135 imaginative perspective-taking empathy respects ‘the boundaries of the other’ and ‘the singularity of the other’s experience’.136 We do not need to understand the individual as the only ethical unit, or as pitted against relationality, to think of it as an essential ethical term. Rather, as Dan Zahavi contends, instead of ‘impeding a satisfactory account of intersubjectivity, an emphasis on the inherent and essential individuation of experiential life must be seen as a prerequisite for getting the relation and difference between self and other right’.137

9 T H E M O R A L VA L U E O F E M PAT H Y I S D I S P U T E D

In the provocatively titled Against Empathy, Paul Bloom assembles criticisms of empathy from different disciplines to present the case that, ‘on the whole’, empathy is ‘a poor moral guide’ which is not equivalent to compassion or fairness.138 It was already clear from Coplan’s sexpartite definition that empathy is an imprecise tool whose ambiguity hampers lucid understanding, assessment and use. Bloom’s criticism runs deeper: the shared features across the variant definitions all harbour the same limitations, annulling the value of empathy as a moral aid. Bloom argues that empathy is, by its definition, narrowly focused. It depends on proximity and interaction with an individual or small number of individuals. As a consequence, it ‘does poorly in a world where there are many people in need, and where the effects of one’s actions are diffuse, often delayed, and difficult to compute’.139 Not only is it narrow in its focus and therefore its impact, Bloom argues that empathy is subject to irrational biases and preferences. It facilitates a kind of parochialism that fosters existing relationships and limits the production of new ones.140 In cross-species interactions, this could easily become species-parochialism, where empathy is reserved for nonhuman animals that exhibit qualities perceived as human. In a more focused challenge, Jesse Prinz looks to demonstrate the dispen-sability of empathy for morality. He argues that empathy is poor at motivating changes; it leads to preferential treatment, is too selective, and is subject to biases; it can be manipulated; and it is subject to sali-ence and proximity effects.141 Unlike Bloom, however, he proposes the cautious retention of empathy, suggesting ways to develop its resistance to bias and to boost its political and ethical force. Similar positions are expressed by Koehn, who frames empathy as ‘morally neutral’, and Matravers, who argues in favour of ‘quarantining our moral thinking from the biases of empathy’.142

20 Animal Writing

That empathy replicates existing prejudices and biases might prove a significant problem for animal studies, particularly in a context where rights-based approaches have long insisted on the necessity of hierarchising nonhuman animals to ascertain their value. An empathy dependent on projection or simulation might lose its way across spe-cies, inadvertently reinforcing an anthropomorphic anthropocentrism. As Elisa Aaltola identifies, there is a striking gap between the poten-tial gains and losses of cross-species empathy; ‘we are left, then’, she concludes, ‘at a junction between empathy as the pathway towards recognizing the morally significant individuality of pigs and pikes and empathy as a nullification of any such recognition’.143 Although premised on relationality, Gruen’s ‘entangled empathy’ presupposes individual subjects who might respond emotionally and cognitively to each other. It is explicitly limited by sentience: while it is relatively easy to empathise with mammals and nonhuman animals with which we share characteristics, can we empathise with ‘non-individuals, such as forests, art and the oceans?’144 Can we conceive of vulnerability with-out sentience? Kari Weil reiterates this problem, noting that:

This difficulty of empathising across difference may be one reason for the disproportionate attention given to apes or to animals we live with like dogs and cats within animal studies; those we find most like us, or whom we most wish to be like.145

Gruen concedes that empathy favours certain species over others but does not clarify whether this has any bearing on ethical value, prefer-ring to endorse a diverse toolkit for responding to different beings; ‘empathy does not appear to be the appropriate ethical response to the non-sentient world’, she notes.146

The limitations of empathy are acutely problematic in the context of a growing environmental crisis in which the significance of non-sentient, and even inanimate, forces is ever-increasing. Such an era calls for new alliances and modes of attentiveness, particularly to the composite relationships between large-scale environmental forces and ‘the minute and the barely felt’.147 At the end of the empathy spectrum is the insect; often generating an ‘immense sense of estrangement’,148 it is hard to imagine responding empathetically to insects.149 However, as Stephen Loo and Undine Sellbach assert, we disregard insects at our peril. Rather, they argue:

we can no longer afford to think about ethics in separation from insects, and the big and small edges of sentience they evoke. Insects are reminders that we are ecologically entangled in ways we often only dimly perceive and are impacting the environment and other species in damaging ways we frequently ignore.150

Introduction 21

Two main consequences follow Loo and Sellbach’s claim: first, that if empathy is to be of any use at all, we must reconfigure it imaginatively in ways that resist its potential parochialism. Here, Pick’s ‘creaturely ethics’, which does not depend on personhood but on ‘the recogni-tion of the materiality and vulnerability of all living bodies’, might be useful.151 Secondly, empathy is only part of the diverse, developing toolkit that we need to respond meaningfully to the changing world we inhabit. While it is clear that ‘moral considerability cannot be reduced to individual subjects’, it is important to remember that ‘the subject (and thus empathy) can still hold principal relevance and support the appreciation of non-individual things’.152 Indeed, rather than dismiss-ing the subject on philosophical or ethical grounds, we must continue to grapple with both the problems and the solutions it presents.

1 0 F O R C RO S S - S P E C I E S S TO RY T E L L I N G , W E M U S T U N D E RS TA N D H OW T E X T WO R K S

While ethological advancements have subdued most appeals to human exceptionalism (such as those premised on cognition, language, tool-use or sentience), the truism that the human is unique as ‘a storytell-ing animal’ persists.153 This is often combined with the assumption that storytelling is a fundamental component in world-making, and that those who are incapable of constructing worlds are destined to passively inhabit those imagined and realised by others. Note, most famously, Martin Heidegger’s contention that ‘the stone is worldless. Similarly, plants and animals have no world; they belong, rather, to the hidden throng of an environment into which they have been put.’154 In its multi-dimensional assault on anthropocentrism, however, animal studies has turned to narrative; ‘storying’, Haraway contends, ‘cannot any longer be put into the box of human exceptionalism’.155 By this, we should read at least the following: that closer observation will reveal nonhuman animals to be active participants in, and creators of, stories; and that stories are ideal spaces for imaginative cross-species connec-tions. For J. M. Coetzee’s character Elizabeth Costello in The Lives of Animals, ‘there are no bounds to the sympathetic imagination’.156 In other words, as Costello expands: ‘If I can think my way into the exist-ence of a being who has never existed, then I can think my way into the existence of a bat or a chimpanzee or an oyster, any being with whom I share the substrate of life.’157 Costello’s is an extreme example of an empathy – not always for the human – often ascribed to literature. As Suzanne Keen states:

22 Animal Writing

In its strongest form, aesthetics’ empathy describes a projective fusing with an object – which may be another person or an animal, but may also be a fictional character made of words, or even, in some accounts, inanimate things such as landscapes, artworks, or geological features.158

Rejecting Heidegger’s position in favour of Jakob von Uexküll’s identification of Umwelten or ‘animal worlds’ which characterise dif-ferent animals’ phenomenal experience,159 David Herman argues that narrative ‘affords a bridge between the human and the nonhuman’.160 ‘By modeling the richness and complexity of “what it is like” for non-human others’, he continues, ‘stories can underscore what is at stake in the trivialization – or outright destruction – of their experiences.’161 Can reading fiction, Keen asks, prove sufficiently powerful to enable us to ‘transmute empathetic guilt into prosocial action’?162 That stories have a role to play in a re-narrativising of the world, ‘a reworlding’ in which humans are not the only active agents, has become a common-place.163 If the human perception of itself as steward and storyteller has precipitated serious environmental damage, then, as Van Dooren et al. contend: ‘Only-human stories will not serve anyone in a period shaped by escalating and mutually reinforcing processes of biosocial destruction – from mass extinction to climate change, from globaliza-tion to terrorism.’164 Myra Hird similarly foresees cross-species ‘world-making’ as the inevitable consequence of acknowledging the networked relations within which we all participate.165 At these points, these ideas are highly abstracted and leave many questions unanswered. How would a cross-species storytelling avoid the tendency towards appro-priation and monologue? Is it possible to bring forth the ‘powerful infidel heteroglossia’ of which Haraway speaks?166

While cross-species storytelling is an admirable goal to pursue, it remains nascent and undertheorised. It cannot be fulfilled by simplistic reiterations of multi-species relationality. As we follow its potential, we should also be alert to the disruptive, inhuman potential of existing forms of writing. Often mistakenly subsumed under the aegis of the ‘linguistic turn’, deconstructive accounts of ‘textuality’ and ‘writing’ expose that which defies or disrupts language, where language is under-stood as embodying closure and systematicity; as Derrida explains: ‘The critique of logocentrism is above else the search for the “other” and “the other of language”.’167 ‘Text’ therefore is not synonymous with language, but haunts or contaminates language (and other simi-larly constrained systems). As Claire Colebrook observes, text is ‘an “untamed genesis”, an anarchic dispersal, a mal d’archive or an evil that works against logic, works against “gathering”, and against any notion of life as oikos’.168 It is, as Derrida reminds us in Limited Inc.,

Introduction 23

‘limited neither to the graphic, nor to the book, nor even to discourse, and even less to the semantic, representational, symbolic, ideal, or ideo-logical sphere’.169 That text describes a force which is irreducible to, and uncontrollable by, the human is recognised by Brinkema in her appeal to ‘sensitivity to textuality’.170 Such a sensitivity makes visible the ways in which human attempts at mastery and projection are destined to fail. Literature, as ‘the institution which allows one to say everything’, is an event through which the human both projects itself and encounters the limits of its own powers.171 This book presupposes that literature offers a privileged space in which these questions – and the emergence of the textual – are played out. It endorses Pick’s claim that literature reflects ‘the incomplete becoming – the struggle of the human to assume and to inhabit a definite form’ and ‘to come to terms with and give shape to an entirely accidental embodiment’.172 It follows Brinkema and Vermeulen in suggesting that this is how we should understand the role of affect in literature; not, as Vermeulen describes, ‘a fatefully pre-linguistic and pre-conscious substance, but an effect of the inability of literary works to fully contain the intensities they irresistibly unleash’. Textual affect is, as Vermeulen notes via Colebrook, ‘a placeholder for unreadabil-ity’.173 In this sense, we must resist the domestication of affect in the form of cross-species emotions and experience, and think again about the interruptive potential of the alliance between affect, text and theory, where theory is not an instance of human mastery, but, as Colebrook writes, ‘an acceptance of a distinction between a strong sense of the inhuman (that which exists beyond, beyond all givenness and imaging, and beyond all relations) and an unfounded imperative that we must therefore give ourselves a law’.174

O U T L I N E

This book consists of five chapters. Chapter 1 examines nonhuman animal suffering and the generation of empathy in Yann Martel’s allegorical novels Life of Pi and Beatrice and Virgil. Informed by Haraway’s assertion that nonhuman animals ‘are not an alibi for other themes’, it compares Beatrice and Virgil, a novel censured for the paral-lels it draws between the Holocaust and nonhuman animal suffering, to Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus.175 It considers our responsi-bilities to real and figurative animals and the tools through which we assess and compare suffering, asking whether we should cultivate cross-species empathy as a means to develop cross-species ethics, or whether empathy is limiting in its aims and reach. Assessing Martel’s depiction of nonhuman animals’ suffering and vulnerability, it turns to the work

24 Animal Writing

of Derrida, Wolfe, Alaimo, Pick and others, as well as considering the implications of Elaine Scarry’s scholarship on the relationship between pain, language and subjectivity for nonhuman animals. Focusing, too, on Martel’s interrogation of the complexities of the storytelling impulse and the possibilities of a cross-species storytelling, it argues that Martel adopts an ironic or deconstructive approach to storytelling, shuttling between critique (stories tend towards the reactionary reiteration of the familiar) and affirmation (stories promise imaginative innovation which enables ‘reworlding’).176 It closes by proposing an inhuman ethics, drawing on Martel’s enactment of deconstructive storytelling and Derrida’s account of ethics beginning from ‘the monstrously other [. . .] the unrecognizable’.177

Chapter 2 considers the relationship between the story of the ‘anthropos’ and twentieth- and twenty-first-century representations of nonhuman primates. Examining Haraway’s critique of primatological practices and narratives, it explores the ways in which an account of human identity generated in response to nonhuman primates substitutes for an ‘anthropos’ which is always in flight, or now, as Claire Colebrook and Tom Cohen argue, only constructed retroactively in response to apocalyptic (and ultimately, redemptive) Anthropocene narratives. Accordingly, the chapter traces the impact of the Anthropocene on our conception of the human, identifying a tension between the tendency to employ the Anthropocene narrative as a tool to reunify the human sub-ject and reinforce species identity in service of a common cause, and the understanding that humanity is splintered according to different degrees of responsibility for environmental destruction; in other words, that the universalism of the universal human was always fictitious. In response to Haraway’s appeal for a less anthropocentric storytelling with ‘many tellers and hearers’178 and Colebrook’s contention that the figure of Man is ‘an effect of a failure to read’,179 this chapter examines Karen Joy Fowler’s fictional account of primate relations, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, interrogating the relationship between the ‘anthropos’ and anthropomorphism within part of a broader discussion of the value of literary, scientific and philosophical anthropomorphisms. Focusing on Fowler’s ambivalence towards anthropomorphism, it considers the relationship between anthropomorphism and empathy. Drawing on Tom Tyler’s distinction between types of anthropomorphism, this chapter interrogates his contention that anthropomorphism necessarily depends on the mistaken designation of specific attributes as uniquely human. Rather, it argues that anthropomorphism can be a useful, if clumsy, tool to explore interspecies difference, provided that we reject the assumption that either term – the human or its nonhuman associate –

Introduction 25

has a fixed essence. Similarly, arguing that both anthropomorphism and empathy are inescapable components of cross-species relations, it con-tends that we should welcome anthropomorphic empathy in its capacity to stimulate new ethical and political responses to nonhuman life from affective responses to cross-species similarity, while acknowledging its lingering anthropocentrism and generating new kinds of response to nonhuman life. The final part of the chapter combines the notion of a ‘chimped-up’ writing with Haraway’s account of cross-species story-telling to ask whether different modes of primatological reading and writing might generate alternatives to the figure of Man which are better able to acknowledge and fulfil our ethical responsibilities to nonhuman life by generating a shift from a ‘politics of representation’ to a ‘politics of articulation’.180

Chapter 3 puts the novels of Jim Crace, distinguished, one commen-tator notes, by an ‘occultish grammar of objects – beetles, stones, cracks in wood’, in conversation with Graham Harman’s brand of Speculative Realism, Object-Oriented Philosophy. Beginning with a discussion of the development of OOP in contradistinction to Bruno Latour’s Actor Network Theory, it assesses the claims made by Harman for the supe-riority of OOP over contemporary relational ontologies, such as that espoused by Bennett. Turning to Crace, the chapter argues that Crace’s fiction enacts a sustained movement away from anthropocentrism, demonstrating the collaborative nature of storytelling and absenting the human from a variety of different landscapes. In their examina-tion of the ‘allure’ of objects, it argues that these novels espouse a position closer to Harman than Bennett. Finally, the chapter addresses Harman’s presentation of aesthetics as first philosophy, asking whether this claim might illuminate the interruptive nature of affect.

Chapter 4 interrogates the desire for order and mastery inherent in natural history, focusing on entomological collecting and the chang-ing figure of the collector. Beginning with Walter Benjamin’s claim that ‘ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects’, this chapter considers the ethical and aesthetic implications of collecting insects.181 Arguing that the discourse of insect collecting is one of objectification and domination, and that entomological classification and practices continue to reflect concerns about sex and gender which were present in its eighteenth- and nineteenth-century instantiations, it aligns the objectification of women with that of insects. Interrogating the notion of aesthetic disinterestedness as licence for such objectifica-tion, it asks whether aesthetic disinterestedness permits an empathetic disengagement which, at its worst, leads to a sociopathic lack of ethical awareness. The chapter has three parts, focusing on John Fowles’s The

26 Animal Writing

Collector, insects in contemporary nature writing and, finally, the most famous lepidopterist of all, Vladimir Nabokov. The concluding section examines the relationship between ethics and aesthetics, appealing for the joint necessity of cross-species empathetic engagement and a dis-tancing that is alert to its own subjective positioning.

In contrast to Chapter 4, which focuses on captured and pinned lepidoptera, Chapter 5 tracks the flying and scurrying of disparate unpinned insects, emphasising both their instrumental and intrin-sic value and the necessity of supplementing empathetic with non- empathetic approaches when thinking and writing with them. It will examine three figures of the insect: the first, the insect as other other in Damien Hirst’s work, exposes the limitations of empathetic responses to nonhuman life. The second, the queer insect, draws on Elizabeth Grosz’s reading of Darwin, Roger Caillois’s interpretation of mimicry and Lee Edelman’s work in queer theory to argue that the insect pro-vides a figure of the inhuman that counters logics of heteronormative futurity. The final figure, that of the disgusting insect, is generated through Braidotti’s reading of Clarice Lispector’s novel The Passion of G.H. and Derrida’s reading of Kant’s third critique, and advances disgust as a useful tool – one that defies figuration – in the development of an inhuman ethics. The book concludes by outlining a methodology for such an ethics.

N OT E S

1. Frans de Waal, The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society (London: Souvenir Press, 2010 [2009]), p. ix. His prediction here refers specifically to American politics.

2. Kari Weil, ‘Empathy’, in The Edinburgh Companion to Animal Studies, ed. Ron Broglio, Undine Sellbach and Lynn Turner (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), p. 126.

3. Amy Coplan and Peter Goldie, ‘Introduction’, in Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives, ed. Amy Coplan and Peter Goldie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. ix–xlvii (p. ix).

4. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, http://www.earlymod-erntexts.com/assets/pdfs/smith1759.pdf (accessed 19 February 2019), p. 1.

5. Suzanne Keen, Empathy and the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 39.

6. Nancy Eisenberg provides an excellent summary of these. See Nancy Eisenberg, ‘Empathy and Sympathy’, in Handbook of Emotions, ed. Michael Lewis and Jeannette M. Haviland Jones (New York: The Guildford Press, 2nd edn, 2000), pp. 677–91.

Introduction 27

7. Amy Coplan, ‘Understanding Empathy: Its Features and Effects’, in Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives, ed. Amy Coplan and Peter Goldie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 3–18 (p. 4).

8. Eisenberg, ‘Empathy and Sympathy’, p. 677. 9. Coplan, ‘Understanding Empathy’, p. 17. 10. Keen, Empathy and the Novel, p. 4. 11. Eisenberg, ‘Empathy and Sympathy’, p. 677. 12. Heide L. Maibom, ‘Introduction: (Almost) Everything You Ever Wanted

to Know about Empathy’, in Empathy and Morality, ed. Heidi L. Maibom (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 1–40 (p. 2).

13. Martin L. Hoffman, Empathy and Moral Development: Implications for Caring and Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 29. See also Alexa Weik von Mossner, Affective Ecologies: Empathy, Emotion, and Environmental Narrative (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2017), p. 80.

14. Weik von Mossner, Affective Ecologies, p. 80; Elisa Aaltola, Varieties of Empathy: Moral Psychology and Animal Ethics (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2018), para 10.64.

15. See, for example, Vittorio Gallese’s claim that ‘at the very beginning of our lifetime, we almost immediately interact with others by reproduc-ing some of their behaviours’. Vittorio Gallese, ‘Embodied Simulation: From Mirror Neuron Systems to Interpersonal Relations’, in Empathy and Fairness: Novartis Foundation Symposium 278 (Chichester: Wiley, 2007), pp. 3–19 (p. 3).

16. ‘These neurons discharge not only when the monkey executes goal-related hand actions like grasping objects, but also when observing other individuals (monkeys or humans) executing similar actions.’ Gallese, ‘Embodied Simulation’, p. 5.

17. Gallese, ‘Embodied Simulation’, pp. 10–11. 18. Derek Matravers, Empathy (Cambridge: Polity, 2017), p. 52. 19. Julinna C. Oxley, The Moral Dimensions of Empathy: Limits and

Applications in Ethical Theory and Practice (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p. 16.

20. Kristin Andrews and Lori Gruen, ‘Empathy in Other Apes’, in Empathy and Morality, ed. Heidi L. Maibom (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 193–209 (p. 195).

21. Aaltola, Varieties of Empathy, para. 14.141. 22. Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 327. 23. Amy Coplan, ‘Empathetic Engagement with Narrative Fictions’, The

Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 62.2 (2004), 141–52 (p. 145). 24. Neil Roughley and Thomas Schramme, ‘Forms of Fellow Feeling:

Empathy, Sympathy, Concern and Moral Agency’, in Forms of Fellow Feeling: Empathy, Sympathy, Concern and Moral Agency, ed. Neil

28 Animal Writing

Roughley and Thomas Schramme (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 3–55 (p. 18).

25. Roughley and Schramme, ‘Forms of Fellow Feeling’, p. 18. 26. Michael Slote, ‘Empathy as an Instinct’, in Forms of Fellow Feeling:

Empathy, Sympathy, Concern and Moral Agency, ed. Neil Roughley and Thomas Schramme (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 133–64 (p. 133).

27. Matravers, Empathy, p. 23. 28. Martin L. Hoffman, ‘Empathy, Justice, and Social Change’, in Empathy

and Morality, ed. Heidi L. Maibom (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 71–96 (p. 96).

29. Dan Batson, ‘Empathy, Altruism and Helping: Conceptual Distinctions, Empirical Relations’, in Forms of Fellow Feeling: Empathy, Sympathy, Concern and Moral Agency, ed. Neil Roughley and Thomas Schramme (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 59–77 (p. 59).

30. Oxley, Moral Dimensions of Empathy, p. 4. 31. Daryl Koehn, Rethinking Feminist Ethics: Care, Trust and Empathy

(London: Routledge, 1998), p. 57. 32. Peter Goldie, cited in Coplan, ‘Empathetic Engagement’, p. 145. 33. Slote, ‘Empathy as Instinct’, p. 133. 34. Karsten Stueber, cited in Matravers, Empathy, p. 18. 35. de Waal, Age of Empathy, p. ix. 36. Eugenie Brinkema, The Forms of the Affects (Durham, NC: Duke

University Press, 2015), p. xi. 37. Lisa Blackman, Immaterial Bodies: Affect, Embodiment, Mediation

(London: Sage, 2012), p. 86. See also Patricia Ticineto Clough, ‘Introduction’, in The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social, ed. Patricia Ticineto Clough with Jean Halley (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), pp. 1–33 (p. 2).

38. For a discussion of this, see Tonya K. Davidson, Ondine Part and Rob Shields, ‘Introduction’, in Ecologies of Affect: Placing Nostalgia, Desire and Hope, ed. Tonya K. Davidson, Ondine Part and Rob Shields (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2011), pp. 1–15.

39. Teresa Brennan, The Transmission of Affect (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), p. 6.

40. Brian Massumi, Politics of Affect (Cambridge: Polity, 2015), p. 5. 41. Pieter Vermeulen, Contemporary Literature and the End of the Novel:

Creature, Affect, Form (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), p. 11.

42. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, ‘An Inventory of Shimmers’, in The Affect Theory Reader, ed. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), pp. 1–28 (p. 3).

43. Massumi, Politics of Affect, p. 4. 44. Davidson, Park and Shields, ‘Introduction’, p. 6.

Introduction 29

45. Vermeulen, Contemporary Literature, p. 8. 46. Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh

University Press, 2014), pp. 1, 8. 47. Brinkema, Forms of the Affects, p. xii. 48. On the latter, see Clough, ‘Introduction’, p. 2. 49. Brinkema, Forms of the Affects, p. xiv. 50. Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), p. 188. 51. Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne

Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), p. 39.

52. Vermeulen, Contemporary Literature, pp. 8–9. 53. Rei Terada, Feeling in Theory: Emotion after the ‘Death of the Subject’

(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), p. 3. 54. Terada, Feeling in Theory, p. 41. 55. Terada, Feeling in Theory, p. 111. 56. Blackman, Immaterial Bodies, p. 1. 57. See, for example, Gregg and Seigworth, ‘An Inventory of Shimmers’, p. 1:

‘[affect] is found in those intensities that pass body to body [. . .], in those resonances that circulate about, between, and sometimes stick to bodies and worlds, and in the very passages or variations between these intensi-ties and resonances themselves’.

58. Brinkema, Forms of the Affects, p. 24. 59. Brinkema, Forms of the Affects, p. 32. 60. Vermeulen, Contemporary Literature, p. 14; Brinkema, Forms of the

Affects, p. xv. 61. Brinkema, Forms of the Affects, p. 33. 62. For a comprehensive summary of, and insightful reflection on, contem-

porary animal studies and its philosophical underpinnings, see Derek Ryan, Animal Theory: A Critical Introduction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015).

63. Anat Pick, Creaturely Poetics: Animality and Vulnerability in Literature and Film (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), p. 11.

64. Hannah Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Meridian, 1958), p. 297.

65. Simone Weil, ‘Human Responsibility’, in Simone Weil: An Anthology, ed. Siân Miles (London: Penguin, 2005), pp. 69–98 (p. 81).

66. Cora Diamond, ‘Injustice and Animals’, in Slow Cures and Bad Philosophers: Essays on Wittgenstein, Medicine and Bioethics, ed. Carl Elliott (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), p. 120.

67. Deborah Slicer, cited in Cary Wolfe, Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), p. 36.

68. Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), p. 5.

69. Cora Diamond, ‘The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of

30 Animal Writing

Philosophy’, Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas, 1.2 (2003), 1–26 (p. 13).

70. Diamond, ‘Difficulty of Reality’, p. 8. 71. Regan, cited in Cathryn Bailey, ‘On the Backs of Animals: The

Valorization of Reason in Contemporary Animal Ethics’, Ethics and the Environment, 10.1 (2005), 1–17 (pp. 1–2).

72. Tom Regan, Defending Animal Rights (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001), p. 63.

73. See, for example, Marc Bekoff, Minding Animals: Awareness, Emotions and Heart (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), and Frans de Waal, Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex Amongst Apes (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007).

74. Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, trans. David Wills (Ashland, OH: Fordham University Press, 2008), pp. 7, 105.

75. Judith Butler, Senses of the Subject (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), p. 15.

76. Koehn, Rethinking Feminist Ethics, p. 5. 77. Braidotti, The Posthuman, p. 49. 78. Bruno Latour, ‘Where Are the Missing Masses? The Sociology of a

Few Mundane Artifacts’, in Shaping Technology – Building Society, ed. Wiebe Bijker and John Law (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), pp. 151–80 (p. 165).

79. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993).

80. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), pp. xiii, 10, 9.

81. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, p. 31. 82. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, p. 37. 83. Alexis Shotwell, Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), p. 85; Stacy Alaimo, Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), p. 112.

84. Donna Haraway, Manifestly Haraway (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), p. 11.

85. Donna Haraway, ‘Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin’, Environmental Humanities, 6 (2015), 159–65 (p. 159).

86. Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People and Significant Otherness (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003), p. 6.

87. Aaltola, Varieties of Empathy, para. 15.7. 88. Lori Gruen, Entangled Empathy: An Alternative Ethic for our

Relationships with Animals (New York: Lantern Books, 2015), p. 14. 89. Gruen, Entangled Empathy, p. 3. 90. Gruen, Entangled Empathy, p. 29.

Introduction 31

91. Joan C. Tronto, Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 102.

92. Tronto, Moral Boundaries, p. 103. 93. Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More

Than Human Worlds (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), p. 6.

94. Koehn, Rethinking Feminist Ethics, p. 7. 95. Shotwell, Against Purity, p. 121. 96. Bellacasa, Matters of Care, p. 70. 97. Bellacasa, Matters of Care, pp. 78, 221. 98. Haraway, ‘Anthropocene’, p. 162. 99. Koehn, Rethinking Feminist Ethics, p. 48. 100. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, p. ix. 101. Joanna Zylinska, Minimal Ethics for the Anthropocene (London: Open

Humanities Press, 2014), p. 42. 102. Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the

Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), p. 185.

103. Graham Harman, ‘Art Without Relations’, http://artreview.com/features/september_2014_graham_harman_relations/ (accessed 14 July 2016).

104. Claire Colebrook, ‘Not Symbiosis, Not Now: Why Anthropogenic Change is Not Really Human’, Oxford Literary Review, 34.2 (2012), 185–209 (p. 193).

105. Bentham, cited in Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, p. 27. 106. Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, p. 28. 107. Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, p. 93. 108. Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, p. 28. 109. Cary Wolfe, Before the Law: Humans and Other Animals in a Biopolitical

Frame (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), p. 10. 110. Wolfe, Before the Law, pp. 30, 104. 111. Alaimo, Exposed, p. 5. 112. Myra J. Hird, ‘Waste, Landfills, and an Environmental Ethic of

Vulnerability’, Ethics and the Environment, 18.1 (2013), 105–24 (p. 107).

113. James Mensch, ‘Empathy and Rationality’, in The Politics of Empathy: New Interdisciplinary Perspectives on an Ancient Phenomenon, ed. Barbara Weber, Eva Marsal and Takara Dobashi (Berlin: Lit, 2011), pp. 17–24 (p. 21).

114. Diamond, ‘Difficulty of Reality’, p. 22. 115. Diamond, ‘Difficulty of Reality’, p. 15. 116. Weil’s influence on Pick is evident here. See Weil: ‘Human thought is

unable to acknowledge the reality of affliction.’ Cited in Diamond, ‘Difficulty of Reality’, p. 23.

117. Pick, Creaturely Poetics, p. 5. 118. Pick, Creaturely Poetics, p. 188.

32 Animal Writing

119. Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004), p. 25.

120. Butler, Precarious Life, p. xiii. 121. Butler, Precarious Life, p. 31. 122. Butler, Precarious Life, p. 20. 123. Wolfe, Before the Law, p. 20. 124. Judith Butler, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (London: Verso,

2016), p. xvi. 125. Butler, Frames of War, pp. 1, xxv. 126. Butler, Precarious Life, p. 25. On this point, see also Brian Massumi’s

concession that ‘there needs to be an ecology of practices that does have room for pursuing or defending rights based on an identification with a certain categorized social group, that asserts and defends a self-interest but doesn’t just do that’. Massumi, Politics of Affect, p. 42.

127. Butler, Frames of War, p. xxvi. 128. Thom van Dooren, Ursula Munster, Eben Kirksey, Deborah Bird Rose,

Matthew Chrulew and Anna Tsing, ‘Multispecies Studies: Cultivating Arts of Attentiveness’, Environmental Humanities, 8.1 (2016), 1–23 (p. 15).

129. Haraway, Manifestly Haraway, p. 268. 130. Butler, Frames of War, p. 76. 131. Butler, Frames of War, p. 76. 132. Butler, Frames of War, p. 76. 133. Joshua May, ‘Empathy and Intersubjectivity’, in The Routledge

Handbook of Philosophy of Empathy, ed. Heidi L. Maibom (London: Routledge, 2017), para 26.48.

134. Coplan, ‘Empathetic Engagement’, p. 145. 135. Lou Agosta, Empathy in the Context of Philosophy (New York: Palgrave

Macmillan, 2010), p. 75. 136. Coplan, ‘Empathetic Engagement’, p. 144. 137. Dan Zahavi, Self and Other: Exploring Subjectivity, Empathy and

Shame (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 189. 138. Paul Bloom, Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion

(London: Vintage, 2007), p. 2. 139. Bloom, Against Empathy, p. 31. 140. Bloom, Against Empathy, p. 9. 141. Jesse J. Prinz, ‘Is Empathy Necessary for Morality?’, in Empathy:

Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives, ed. Amy Coplan and Peter Goldie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 211–29 (pp. 226–7).

142. Koehn, Rethinking Feminist Ethics, p. 58; Matravers, Empathy, p. 120. 143. Aaltola, Varieties of Empathy, para. 8.18. 144. Aaltola, Varieties of Empathy, para. 15.13. 145. Weil, ‘Empathy’, p. 128. 146. Gruen, Entangled Empathy, p. 68.

Introduction 33

147. Stephen Loo and Undine Sellbach, ‘Insect Affects’, Angelaki, 20.3 (2015), 79–88 (p. 86).

148. Rosi Braidotti, Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming (Cambridge: Polity, 2002), p. 149.

149. Prinz, ‘Is Empathy Necessary for Morality?’, p. 212. 150. Loo and Sellbach, ‘Insect Affects’, p. 80. 151. Pick, Creaturely Poetics, p. 193. 152. Aaltola, Varieties of Empathy, para. 15.14. 153. Jonathan Gottschall, The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us

Human (Wilmington, MA: Mariner Books, 2013). 154. Martin Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, in Off the Beaten

Track, ed. and trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 23.

155. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, p. 39. 156. J. M. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals, The Tanner Lectures on Human

Values, Princeton University, 15 and 16 October 1997, https://tan nerlectures.utah.edu/_documents/a-to-z/c/Coetzee99.pdf (accessed 18 February 2019), p. 133.

157. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals, p. 133. 158. Keen, Empathy and the Novel, p. 28. 159. Jakob von Uexküll, A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans,

trans. Joseph D. O’Neil (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010 [1934]), p. 199.

160. David Herman, ‘Storyworld/Umwelt: Nonhuman Experiences in Graphic Narratives’, SubStance, 40.1 (2011), 156–81 (p. 159).

161. Herman, ‘Storyworld/Umwelt’, p. 159. 162. Keen, Empathy and the Novel, p. 18. 163. Haraway, Manifestly Haraway, p. 215. 164. Van Dooren et al., ‘Multispecies Studies’, pp. 2–3. 165. Hird, ‘Waste’, p. 109. 166. Haraway, cited in Joseph Schneider, Donna Haraway: Live Theory

(London: Continuum, 2005), p. 75. 167. Jacques Derrida, ‘Deconstruction and the Other’, in States of Mind:

Dialogues with Contemporary Thinkers on the European Mind, ed. Richard Kearney (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), p. 173.

168. Colebrook, ‘Not Symbiosis’, p. 196. 169. Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc., trans. Samuel Weber and Jeffrey Mehlman,

ed. Gerald Graff (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988), p. 148.

170. Brinkema, Forms of the Affects, p. 37. 171. Jacques Derrida, ‘“This Strange Institution Called Literature”: An

Interview with Jacques Derrida’, trans. and ed. Rachel Bowlby, in Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 36.

172. Pick, Creaturely Poetics, p. 83.

34 Animal Writing

1. Fragile Bodies, Cross-species Empathy and Suspended

Allegories: ‘It hurt, it was painful – that’s all there is to say’

A fascination with the power and possibilities of storytelling pervades Yann Martel’s fiction, from the early story ‘The Facts behind the Helsinki Roccamatios’, a paean to ‘the transformative wizardry of the imagination’,1 through his best-selling novel Life of Pi, which promises ‘a story that will make you believe in God’,2 and its less critic-friendly and altogether more sceptical successor, Beatrice and Virgil. For Martel, storytelling is a fitting response to the bleakest and most destructive circumstances; in the face of imminent death, Paul, in ‘The Facts behind the Helsinki Roccamatios’, commits to a storytelling pact designed to ‘embrace the world’ and ‘destroy void’.3 In Beatrice and Virgil, unceremoniously dismissed by critic Sarah Churchwell as ‘by turns pretentious, humourless, tedious, and obvious’, Martel is ruth-lessly interrogative of the storytelling impulse, exposing it as a confused amalgam of desires to witness, master and celebrate.4

The possibility that storytelling and empathy might be inexorably connected is addressed by Suzanne Keen in Empathy and the Novel. We perceive empathetic abilities as a gauge of psychological health and storytelling as key to the construction of human communities; empathy, like reading, is ‘a complex imaginative process involving both cognition and emotion’.5 There is a long debate as to whether the imaginative and empathetic engagement required by reading literature might make us better, or even worse, people,6 with a shift in our perception of the moral value of fiction occurring, Keen contends, with the translation of Einfühlung in the early twentieth century.7 Can fiction teach us to be empathetic? Can reading help us to convert empathetic impulses into ‘prosocial action’?8 As Keen notes: ‘The same drive to affiliate with others for comfort and safety that expresses itself in empathy and sym-pathy may also play a role in our species’ enthusiasm for narrative.’9

In positing a connection between empathy and storytelling, however,

173. Vermeulen, Contemporary Literature, p. 9, citing Claire Colebrook, ‘The Calculus of Individual Worth’, in Tom Cohen, Claire Colebrook and J. Hillis Miller, Theory and the Disappearing Future: On De Man, on Benjamin (London: Routledge, 2012), p. 144.

174. Claire Colebrook, Death of the PostHuman: Essays on Extinction, Vol. 1 (London: Open Humanities Press, 2014), p. 31.

175. Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto, p. 5. 176. Haraway, Manifestly Haraway, p. 215. 177. Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign: Volume I, trans. Geoffrey

Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), p. 108. 178. Donna Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race and Nature in the

World of Modern Science (London: Verso, 1989), p. 8. 179. Colebrook ‘What is the Anthropo-Political?’, p. 93. 180. While Cohen and Colebrook use the term ‘Anthropos’ specifically to

refer to the subject that is generated by, or at least perceived in light of, the Anthropocene, I shall be using the terms Man and Anthropos inter-changeably to illustrate that this Anthropocene subject does not break with, but reinforces, the ‘metaphysical heritage’ of the figure of Man.

181. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), p. 67.